Michael Dehaan is a veteran software leader and entrepreneur with 16 years of experience building production-grade automation and infrastructure tooling, best known as the creator of Cobbler and Ansible and as founder/CTO of Ansible, Inc. Now CEO of Michael DeHaan LLC, he continues to advance automation with his latest project JetPorch while maintaining an active footprint in influential open-source projects like AWX. His background blends deep backend engineering—Django-based service design and CLI tooling—with product leadership across startups and enterprise teams at Red Hat and Puppet Labs. Based in Cary, NC, he also taught computer science at NC State, reflecting a commitment to mentoring the next generation of engineers. Notably, his contributions often establish foundational architecture and developer-facing workflows that enable larger ecosystems to build on top of his work.
16 years of coding experience
18 years of employment as a software developer
BS, Computer Science, BS, Computer Science at NC State University
AWX provides a web-based user interface, REST API, and task engine built on top of Ansible. It is one of the upstream projects for Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform.
Role in this project:
Backend Developer
Contributions:60 commits, 1 issue in 1 year 10 months
Contributions summary:Michael primarily created stubs for various services, focusing on the core Django application structure. They also made changes to the settings and configuration files, including database settings, indicating a role in backend development and possibly initial setup tasks. The commits also included the creation of basic model and view files, establishing the foundation for several modules. The codebase involves a Django application with South migrations.
THIS TOOL IS NO LONGER UNDER ACTIVE DEVELOPMENT. This tool is being phased out in favor of the new official AWX CLI
Role in this project:
Backend Developer
Contributions:10 commits in 10 months
Contributions summary:Michael primarily focused on developing the backend functionality for the AWX CLI tool. Their contributions include the initial setup of the project, creating a version command to display CLI and server information, and implementing a job launch command. Furthermore, the user incorporated configuration file support and standardized output formatting.
cli
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